Bio
My name is Hammond Whiting, but everybody calls me Ham. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Truman State University for my Undergraduate degree, a B. A in Studio Art focused on ceramics and a minor in Art History.
As an ex-chemistry major, I’m attracted to glaze chemistry, making glazes, and playing with stains and oxides. Ceramics involves a lot of science and works a lot like magic.
I am most certainly a multi-media artist because I love the process of making the most. In addition to ceramics I do a lot of photography and illustration, but I’m determined to try anything once!
Artist Statement
Alchemy is the seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination. I approach my work as an alchemist through the lens of an artist, mixing up ingredients in the glaze lab or darkroom, capturing light and printing it on paper, forming vessels out of raw earth, or crafting glazes from the ashes of cicadas. My work combines ceramics, photography (mostly darkroom), and illustration.
In the studio and darkroom, I embrace the experimental, and my work exists in the world of dreams and magic and the spaces in between. I approach my work scientifically, documenting and experimenting with many methods, my notebooks are tomes and lab notes of a mad scientist. Using illustration and self-crafted glazes, I can transform clay into otherworldly or magical objects, my photos act as a portal into that world. My most recent project is creating a large ceramic wind chime and several bells that audience members can activate as a sound cleansing of the space, allowing their participation in the ritual. By allowing viewers to interact with the pieces they are immersed into my magical world, showing them that magic is everywhere and anyone can tap into it.